Dead Sandisk 2GB CF

[mlav]

Bought my first new CF card in two years...and never had a failure until now. It was the new card of course. Sandisk Ultra II 2GB CF. I'll never go over 2GB for my photo cards to minimize losses, might even go back down to 1GB cards.

Sure glad it was the last few shots of the Christmas party! Any ideas on how to recover the data other than using a data recovery service?

http://mlav.com/2gb.gif

[DennisW1]

Bought my first new CF card in two years...and never had a failure until now. It was the new card of course. Sandisk Ultra II 2GB CF. I'll never go over 2GB for my photo cards to minimize losses, might even go back down to 1GB cards.

Sure glad it was the last few shots of the Christmas party! Any ideas on how to recover the data other than using a data recovery service?

http://mlav.com/2gb.gif

I don't have any personal recommendations as I've never had to use any of them, but if you do a Google search for CF card data recovery there are many free or cheap programs out there that claim to be able to recover stuff off of CF and other types of memory cards. Usually the data is still there intact, but in your case it looks like the card's directory structure was corrupted somehow and it doesn't know what it has on it.
Just don't try to write anything else to the card or delete anything before you attempt some sort of recovery. Of course it nothing on it is of vital importance, you could try just re-formatting the car either in the camera or on your computer.
And just FYI, Sandisk warranties their cards for 5 years, so at least if the card is really toast you can get it replaced. I've only had one Sandisk card fail, and that was back in the days of the infamous SmartMedia (AKA "DumbMedia") cards. I use 95% Sandisk and have never had a CF card give me any problems (....knocking on anything made of wood.....)

[Mike R]

Sandisk has a program called Rescue Pro. It comes with their Extremem III cards. It recovered images for me that another program couldn't. Check their website and see if it's available for download.

[Jon]

The gold standard (pay, not free though) is PhotoRescue Expert (http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/index2.htm). You can download a trial version which will show you what it can recover; if you're happy, pay for a registration key and recover everything. It works.

[mlav]

Thanks for the replies.

I DLed a trial version of RescuePro and it found the files.

Rather than pay $40 for the program, I went to Circuit Chitty and got a 2GB Extreme III CF card with the program - for $22!

Thank for the quick feedback.

[nadtz]

Just to say it, that is not a dead card. Likely one of a couple things happened which caused the problems you are seeing, but calling it a 'dead' card when it in fact malfunctioned is misleading (unfortunatly lots of people use the wrong terminology when refering to these kinds of problems).

It seems you have already recovered the data, so congrats in that regard. A great program that has never failed me with a working disk is http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec (there are other great free/OS tools out there as well).

[nadtz]

That does make me wonder why there isnt a data recovery sticky, it comes up often enough.